Pardon the interruption, dear readers. I need this space to correct the record.

John
Doyle I'd love to let you all carry on without
interruption, but I do need to straighten out one commenter. Peter, I haven't
even seen Beck's piece, so you'll have to save your polemics for some other
angle of attack on my post. To the extent that I started my investigation with
Fresno because I lived there once, I plead guilty. The rest were selected as
randomly as I could manage (what with my ACME List Randomizer still in the shop
and all) -- so while truly not random, they certainly weren't selected to suit
an agenda. That is all. Carry on.

John
Doyle As of this moment I haven't seen his post. Send me a link. And
generally speaking, I can only be polite about being called a liar for just ...
so ... long, as anynoe who knows me well will attest. Tread lightly, chum.

Peter Ravn Rasmussen I do have to
sleep and work some time, you know,John -- and being
in a different time zone means I do that at my convenience, not yours. Sitting here over my morning
coffee, I can't presently find the Glenn Beck list I referenced (I don't go
making bo...See More

Sitting here over my morning coffee, I can't presently
find the Glenn Beck list I referenced (I don't go making bookmarks of his
ravings, as you well know). So, if it comes down to that, I have no link to reference
(mostly because my google-fu can't find it right now -- but if I do, I will
link it later).

But let's just for the sake of argument take the Blaze article referenced
above, and consider it.

Your list, which you call random, coincides in 5 of its 10 "not a 'school
shooting' because reasons" instances with the Blaze list of 31 incidents.
So what's the probability of that, assuming you did what you claim, and just
drew ten random numbers?

0.01054773662

About 100 to 1.

If that's random, John, it's a highly improbable outcome.

Now, if you'd just started out by saying, "I've looked at the list, and
there are some cases that strike me as problematic", you would have been
on perfectly sound ground -- you might even have gotten me to agree that some
of them should have been avoided. Even though the 74 listed incidents were
selected by a quite transparent methodology, that doesn't mean the method could
not have been refined to be more convincing, by leaving out some of the cases.
I'd have been the first to admit that.

But you had to go and poke my math-brain by claiming that your list was
"random". Not the smartest move.

John
DoylePeter Ravn Rasmussen,
I'm going to "unfriend" you now. But before I do I want to you to
know that if you had pulled this stunt within 200 miles of me--calling me a
liar and then blaming ME when you couldn't back up your slander--I would have
taken the time to track you down to discuss this face to face. Adios, mother
fucker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjlicBcvw-o